Cookies mailed to family today! Photo shows the 14 kinds I baked, although 1 of them was too delicate to mail so will go on trays for local friends and here at home.
From lower left corner, up and clockwise
Chocolate covered cherry cookie
Vanishing oatmeal raisin
Apricot foldover
Molasses Spice
Graham Washboard
Cranberry Pinwheel
Crispy rice shortbread square (too fragile to mail)
Cardamom toast biscotti
Mirro Snowflake press cookie (also wreath shape)
Pecan Tassie
Peanut butter press cookie ( 3 shapes)
Lemon cashew shortbread
Frosted walnut squares
center - lemony stripes
@mig this was a Mpls Star Tribune Cookie Contest 2004 Finalist from Jean Livingood of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Paraphrased below and over on Nov WAYB I gave a link to a youtube video article showing the steps.
Makes about 3 dozen cookies.
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon lemon extract (or 1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice )
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups flour
½ cup roasted cashews, chopped
Additional sugar for dough
Freshly grated lemon zest, optional (but essential per my friend)
Directions
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line cookie sheets with parchment,
Beat butter until creamy, about 1 minute. Gradually add sugar and beat about 2 minutes, until light and fluffy. Add lemon extract (or lemon juice and lemon zest) and vanilla extract, and beat until thoroughly combined. Use low speed on mixer, add flour and mix just until dough begins to form a ball. Stir in cashews.
Shape dough into 1½ -inch balls. (Optional - I omitted - Roll dough balls in additional sugar) Place 2 inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets and flatten with bottom of a glass. Sprinkle with a bit of fresh lemon zest. Bake just until cookies are set and edges are lightly browned, 17 to 19 minutes. Let rest on sheets for 2 minutes, then move cookies to a wire rack.
Alice Medrich has a cashew cookie made with 1 lb of cashews. Most are ground into butter. I’ve never gotten around to making them because of the amount as even half the amount is something I rarely have around.
There are two cashew recipes in the Gourmet cookie book:
Dutch caramel cashew cookies
Mocha toffee bars
The first one starts with making a cashew praline that you chop and add to a butter cookie. They look phenomenal.
The second one also sounds incredible, but I’m all about butter cookies, so I have a natural inclination towards the first one.
My personal favorites are (tied) the Cardamom Toast Biscotti and the Pecan Tassie. There’s a 3-way tie for 2nd place this year: Cranberry Pinwheel, Snowflakes and Apricot Foldover.
The chocolate covered cherry cookie theoretically could take Grand Champion prize but it’s so labor-intensive it will be a couple more weeks until I’ve “forgiven” it and can just enjoy the flavors. I don’t make it every year, and bake it early in the sequence when I’m still fresh.
Shortbread in a Nordic Ware pan. I like the NYT recipe (gift link here), swapping out 20% of the AP flour for rice flour. I used European style butter and granulated sugar.
If I were gifting the cookies, I’d be tempted to trim (and eat, of course) the edges so that all the cookies were of identical size, but since this batch is just for us, I left them as is. I broke two of the cookies unmolding the shortbread. We’ll eat those first and pretend it didn’t happen.
I think I like NW’s bigger snowflake pan better (more dramatic results), and next will revert back to that one next year.
Rice flour: I’ve heard this mentioned several times. It’s to make the shortbread snappier?
Are the size pieces from that pan smaller than those from the snowflake pan (diff shape I know, but wondering about size.) I have that bigger pan and when I used it last year, I found people hesitant to take the pieces (because they’re so big.) I myself had no such hesitation!
The rice flour makes it grainier. I like it grainy. And I love the generous portion size of that bigger snowflake pan!
The snowflake pan will give you 8 pieces; the shallower pan with squares gives you 9 from the same amount of dough. Not a huge difference. If you trimmed off (after baking) the rope border from all the edge pieces, so that all 9 pieces looked like the center piece in my photo, you could shrink them a bit more, but not by much. I think if trimmed they would at least look smaller than the snowflake pieces, however, which might be enough of an illusion to encourage folks to take a piece.
Rice flour contains no gluten, so it makes a more delicate shortbread without the unpleasant chalkiness of cornstarch which is often added to shortbread (I know lots of people don’t notice and mind cornstarch, but for people like me cornstarch ruins shortbread). If you use an Asian rice flour, which is very finely ground powder, you will have no rice texture, but if you use standard rice flour you will get the grainy texture @MunchkinRedux mentions.
No, that’s glutinous rice flour.
I mean regular rice flour. It’s just that the rice flour you get in Asian markets is much finer than something like Bob’s Red Mill, Goya, etc.
It is completely powdery the way something like cornstarch is. I can’t make certain things with regular rice flour because the result is gritty and lacks cohesion. Even in gluten-free cakes with rice flour, the difference is pretty big. Rice flour cakes made with very finely ground rice flour taste like regular cake, whereas average western supermarket rice flour has unwanted texture.
I don’t make it every year, and bake it early in the sequence when I’m still fresh.
